Mailing Tool

• ReachMail has one of the most generous free plans. You can mail up to 15, 000 messages — and store up to 5, 000 contacts — per month. You’ll get all the tracking and deliverability support expected, plus you can create surveys and include social media engagement. The drawback? You’ll see the ReachMail logo at the bottom of your emails.
• If you want to combine your hosting account with email marketing, Kualo is worth a look. A free trial includes 15, 000 emails sent each month and 2, 000 subscribers.

Subject Line Optimization

6. The only way to access this tool is if you are in your MailChimp account and have started building your email message. But if you are willing to get that far, you’ll have access to a tool that lets you compare your email subject line to all the email subject lines ever sent in the MailChimp system, with performance data. Given how powerful subject lines are, that’s a nice advantage.
7. This is very different from what MailChimp offers, but it might be helpful. You’ll be able to see how your subject line will look across a dozen different email clients. With this tool you can make sure the critical part of your subject line isn’t getting cut off.

Spam and Deliverability Tools

8. If you did decide to use a WordPress plugin to manage your email marketing, then this is a good tool to check regularly. The Sender Score tool will take the domain name or IP address you’re mailing from and give you back some metrics on how it looks to the eyes of an email client’s spam filter. It’s a quick way to measure your email’s reputation.
9. No matter which email service provider you use, this tool is worth checking for every email message you send. It gives you a detailed analysis, but also shows you how other recently-sent emails in your industry compare to yours.
10. This tool is more technical than other spam checkers, but if you’re having a problem, send your webmaster to this site. It might turn up something interesting.

HTML Creators, Converters, and CSS Optimizers

14. Do you have an HTML email but also want to send a text version? This is the tool for you. You can format more than just emails with this.
15. Not all email clients are set to automatically show images, so it’s critical your call-to-action buttons are viewable whether images are turned on or off. Enter the CSS button. This nifty tool lets you create buttons and export them either as PNG images or as CSS code. If you’ve ever spent an hour fighting with Photoshop to get a button made, you’ll love this.

Free Images and Image Shrinkers

When it comes to engaging people, images rule the web. The problem for emails on a budget is to find great images, and then to get them to be small enough that your emails don’t get blocked. These four resources make that easy.

17. This tool lets you shrink photos down to 70 percent of their original size with minimal loss of image quality. You can also do simple image edits like crop, resize, and add a border.
18. This tool is similar to Web Resizer, but also lets you grab pictures from other websites. Be aware of copyrighted material when using this tool.
19. This article from BestsellerLabs.com lists enough free image resources to keep you busy for awhile.